Form binding

I'm sort of surprised noone has asked this before (or: I'm just really bad at searching the forums, in that case I apologize) but is there a simple, clean way to facilitate form binding within Ext? What I'm looking for is a standardized easy way of connecting a form to the back-end. I've noticed forms support 'actions' but I couldn't quite make out what they do or how they work. Some simple examples will be greatly appreciated.